In recent years, communication technologies that make videoconferencing and other advanced teleconferencing applications practical have advanced significantly. At the same time, costs for these advanced technologies have rapidly decreased. By using systems that make possible videoconferencing or other multimedia or multicomponent teleconferencing, an entire company may meet to discuss strategies for trading, marketing and hiring without hotel reservations, flight delays, stopovers, meal expenses and those dreaded urban cab rides. For affordable amounts of money, a company having geographically dispersed offices, can link nationally and globally for impromptu corporate-wide meetings or simply communication sessions between two individuals at different offices. Multicomponent teleconferencing enhances communications and gives more consistent service and products. In addition, these technologies permit people to work in groups and global teams, to look at business in a global perspective, as well as do other important tasks.
Not only do advanced teleconferencing systems such as videoconferencing systems reduce some travel costs, but they also increase the frequency of meetings. Before these technologies existed, people could only meet face-to-face annually. However, with such conferencing capabilities, people can meet more frequently. Advanced teleconferencing systems make communications more like a meeting, so that people seem to be all in the same room.
As a result of the increased attractiveness and business acceptance of advanced teleconferencing systems, technological advances are occuring at ever-increasing rates. While advances to teleconferencing systems proceed, one of the major limitations in the systems relate to the transfer of information other than the audio and video images during the teleconference.
A known method of communicating data during multicomponent teleconference is whiteboarding. The whiteboarding process simply sends a bitmap image back and forth from a source terminal to a destination terminal. The limitations associated with whiteboarding include the fact that there is no practical way to change the bitmap. While it may be possible to draw on the bitmap at the destination terminal, whiteboarding does not provide the ability to manipulate the data that the bitmap contains. In essence, whiteboarding does not provide a functional image at the destination. This is because there is no way to link the image back to a given application.
For those processes that permit sharing of data that is tied to an application program, the requirement exists of sharing the application that supports the data. Sharing the application, however, is a computationally intensive and limiting process. This is because sharing the application involves sharing the input devices such as a mouse or keyboard. The problem that occurs in this scenario is that the users compete for access to the application using one or more input devices. The result is that during a teleconference, the give and take that must occur to share the input devices inputs in many ways distracts from the content and communication that occurs during the teleconference.